💬 - What's the COOLEST Vim plugin?

Hello!

A while back I wrote a post asking for who knows Vim on Indiehackers

I got a lot of responses and useful advice.

Today I started to configure my .vimrc and wanted to open this question up to the community:

What are your favorite plugins for configuring Vim?

Thanks for your help. The ocean 🌊 of Vim plugins out there can be quite a lot to take in. I have found some essential plugins such as NerdTree and the palenight theme, but I was wondering what other great plugins were out there.

Feel free to share in the comments below ⬇

Comments

[Elliot Jackson]

For me the must-haves are:

• fzf.vim for fuzzy searching
• coc.nvim for language server autocompletion
• ale for linting and auto formatting
• vim-polyglot as a language pack
• vim-test paired with neoterm for running tests and seeing the output within vim

To manage your plugins, vim-plug.

Outside of the big ones above there are a few that just make the whole vim experience a little nicer in my opinion, all of them made by Tim Pope:

• vim-eunuch gives you commands like :Rename and :Delete
• vim-commentary for comments
• vim-surround for changing the surrounding, well, everything
• vim-endwise if you work in a language that uses do / end keywords
• vim-unimpaired adds some bracket mappings that make sense

[Reinhart Previano K.]

NerdTree is nice, but in Neovim there is an inbuilt Terminal plugin, just like modern IDEs such as VSCode.

Hence I can start Neovim in Terminal in Neovim in Terminal in Neovim in Terminal in Neovim in Terminal in...

Oh great what a recursion.

[Ben Sinclair]

I disagree - NERDTree is missing the point of Vim. The Vim world is a bit split between people who want to make it look like a traditional tab-based editor and people who don't.

And the terminal isn't a great reason to advocate for Neovim since it's not really that useful to most people (Vim is already in the terminal and can read and write to it fine) and a terminal has been in regular Vim since early version 8 sometime.

[Reinhart Previano K.]

The Vim world is a bit split between people who want to make it look like a traditional tab-based editor and people who don't.

This is true, and the extensibility of tabs and plugins under a TUI is what makes Vim itself unique. I can simply guess that the purpose of NERDTree is to introduce Vim for those who are already familiar with modern GUI-based IDEs, as they usually put the File/Project/Directory Explorer on the left, which some may find it easier to navigate rather than bashing on a bunch of ls or :ls commands.

The reason I put the Neovim's Terminal (and since I know that the feature is coming to Vim 8 as well) is simply to pull out a recursion joke. So now behold, Vim is now the world's second recursible text editor^.

^So does Emacs, at least on the GNU/Linux world

[Brayden W ⚡️]

Thanks, I've heard of Neovim before. I will be sure to give it a try.

[Heiker]

My favorite plugins are the ones that make native features more intuitive. vim has some cool stuff builtin, but sometimes they are so difficult to use it's not even funny.

• vim-obsession

It adds one command to manage the file of your current session.

• quick-scope

Enhances the f and t moves, by providing you with hints to move faster across a line.

• vim-sneak

And speaking of moves. This one is in the same spirit, but it works across the visible portions of the window.

• nuake

Makes it easier to toggle the built-in terminal. Just that.

• vim-zoom

To maximize a window. I mostly use this with nuake, because sometimes I need the terminal to take the whole screen.

• vim-qf

Modifies some of the behaviors of the quickfix window. To make it nicer.

• quickfix-reflector.vim

This one also works with the quickfix window. It makes it modifiable in a more "intuitive" way. It makes big updates (like find and replace across a project) so much easier.

Here is my config if anyone is curious.

[Timothy Merritt]

Goyo (made by the creator of Vim Plug, my favorite Vim plugin manager) is amazing when you want distraction-free writing.

[Adrian Sanchez]

For me these are a must:
• Vim COC
• FZF
• Editorconfig
• Polyglot
• NERD Commenter

Some other that I personally use are Vim-Surround, Vim-Repeat, Vim-Autoclose, Emmet, Tabular, Supertab, Wordmotion, Lightline, Vim-Gitgutter and Grubox.

[Israel Fermín M.]

I'm a huge fan of airline and fugitive, with few remaps fugitive can be very very powerful.

YCM and CoC are also great for code completion.

[leon]

CoC.vim and its ecosystem (coc-explorer, coc-git etc) really took vim/neovim to another level that you can do everything in terminal. A must have IMHO.